"In this case, we really don't know what the landscape is as far as the products,
and what's available," said the General Services Administration's Deb Gallagher, a team co-chair, in an interview with Federal News Radio. "I think it's very important to have our industry partners involved, because they do have good solutions, and they have good ideas of how to approach some of these areas of concern."

"What we're trying to do is accept those [credentials], so that
citizens can come into the federal government and access the resources that they
need access to," Gallagher said.

The team is creating common requirements that all agencies could agree to around
federated identity management in the cloud.

"This opportunity is for us to provide a service so all federal agencies can
accept these credentials without having to go through a lot of integration at the
agency level," said Gallagher, who is also director of identity assurance and
trusted access at GSA.

Interested vendors should submit input on 13 topics, including descriptions of
products and practices to preserve privacy.

"What we're trying to do is make sure that the citizen understands that we're not
promulgating the information across all of the ... resources that they might be
looking at," Gallagher said.

The FCCX Tiger Team has posted a blog entry with instructions for submitting
input.